Complexity and Simplicity
to complicate things simply much too much
That’s a simple title for a complex matter.
Amongst my many contradictions, one is that i am a fairly simple person who complicates things. Or maybe it’s that i’m a complex person who rather simplify things but doesn’t for fear of missing something.
Not understanding seems less stressful than misunderstanding because at least then i can say, “I don’t understand.”
As i study Christian thought and theory, one of the things that has struck me again and again is how relatively simple i tend to think of things. I often get lost in the theological texts and criticisms while being fascinated still. It’s something how the simple can be marvelously complex, like love, light, blood, and water.
Christianity is wonderfully simple yet marvelously complex, of such infinite wonder.
When it comes to everyday matters, i am fond of the simple while still liking the complex, they all have their wonders and charms.
Of course, you’d think i’d learn that to be the case when it comes to doing other things, like commentations for art and contentions for study, but, no, i don’t.
And i am thoroughly miffed when a piece i wrote as thinking, usually due to being lost about the topic, gets better interest than a piece i wrote after much thinking.
Interest and attention are such wonders sometimes.
Yet, despite the appearance that effortful work did no better than effortless work, what effortful work did was help me learn how to study and research. Maybe it was the effortful work that, perhaps through osmosis, made the effortless work better.
It’s like when the complex becomes simple.
It is good to start simple, it is also good to learn the more complex and complicated, and it is still good as well to learn how to shift between various states and forms of simplicity and complexity.
Whether the simple or complex is more effective depends on the context.
Ecclesiastes warns that “much study is a weariness of the flesh”1 yet it is also written in Proverbs that to “learn all you can”2 is a favor unto yourself.
On one note, staying simple might work finely and efficiently and wonderfully. On another note, working more complexly has its merits and uses, too. And sometimes the simple is complex within itself or the complex makes things simple.
There is time for simplicity and there is time for complexity.
And isn’t that’s lovely?
From Proverbs 19:8, Good News Translation.
From Ecclesiastes 12:12, American Standard Version.